Archive for the ‘Britain’ Category

I wonder if we should Crowdfund money for Tommy Robinson to do a really good Research Methodologies Master’s? There is little doubt he is smart enough to get on such a course, which is why he is such a menace. But would he apply himself to the learning?

Journalist calls police as Tommy Robinson makes video at his home

Far-right activist and Ukip adviser appears at 11pm and again at 5am in retaliation for delivery of legal letter

Peter Walker and Nazia Parveen

Tue 5 Mar 2019 12.53 GMT Last modified on Tue 5 Mar 2019 13.34 GMT

A journalist has made a complaint to police after the far-right activist Tommy Robinson appeared outside his house during the night, repeatedly knocking on the door and windows and demanding to speak to him.

Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who is an adviser to the Ukip leader Gerard Batten, filmed himself outside the Luton home of Mike Stuchbery, who often writes about far-right issues.

In the footage, which was live-streamed to the internet, Robinson demanded to speak to Stuchbery, and promised to return again on other nights.

Robinson gave Stuchbery’s street address and threatened to give out the home addresses of other journalists, saying: “I’m going to make a documentary that exposes every single one of you, every single detail about every one of you. Where you live, where you work, everything about you is going to be exposed.”

In a series of tweets sent at the time Stuchbery said he remained in the house and called the police. Robinson went away when officers attended the scene, but according to Stuchbery he then returned at 5am, asking again to be let in.

…

@MikeStuchbery_
I’ve spent the last few months documenting how ‘Tommy Robinson’ uses doorstepping to intimidate his critics, and how social media giants have enabled it.

So what does he do? Turns up at my house tonight. 1/

…

Solicitor Tasnime Akunjee said Stuchbery was left shaken following the incident.

He said: “Mr Lennon turned up at Mike Stuchbery’s home address at roughly 11pm and again at 5am. On both occasions he violently banged on Mr Stuchbery’s doors and windows causing alarm and distress to the occupants.”

In a later tweet, Stuchbery said he had made a statement to police, and handed them video and audio footage of the incident.

From comments Robinson made in the stream video, his motivation seems to have been the filing of a legal letter to his family home on Sunday, giving him formal notice of an intended libel action by lawyers representing a Syrian refugee who was allegedly attacked at school.

Stuchbery was among people who helped organise a crowdfund which raised £10,300 to help pay for the legal action against Robinson, founder of the English Defence League anti-Islam street protest group.

Footage of the 15-year-old victim, who can be identified only as Jamal, being pushed to the ground at his Huddersfield school and having water poured on his face attracted widespread condemnation in December.

Hours after the video went viral, Robinson claimed on Facebook that Jamal had previously attacked three schoolgirls and a boy, something denied by the mother of one of the girls allegedly assaulted.

Facebook deleted several of Robinson’s videos for violating community standards after Jamal’s family announced their intention to sue in November.

On Tuesday the page was removed as Robinson was permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram for repeatedly breaking policies on hate speech. Facebook said he broke rules that ban public calls for violence against people based on protected characteristics; rules that ban supporting or appearing with organised hate groups; and policies that prevent people from using the site to bully others.

Robinson said by email that the delivery of the letter entailed “intimidating an innocent woman and her children by sending five men with a dog to the house whilst I wasn’t even in the country”. Stuchbery said on Twitter that the letter was handed to a police officer 50m away from Robinson’s property.

In November last year, Batten appointed Robinson as his official adviser on prisons and grooming gangs, seen as part of a wider move of Ukip towards the far right.

The Ukip leader said Robinson, who faces a possible retrial after successfully appealing against a jail term for contempt of court for live-streaming videos to Facebook from outside a grooming gang case, had “great knowledge” about the subjects.

Robinson has been approached for further comment.

More on research methodologies / talking shit:

Meanwhile, after the British Prime Minister yesterday said there is ‘no direct correlation’ between police cuts (plus, she seemed to me to imply, austerity more generally) and the rise in knife crime in the UK…

If you look at the figures, what you see is that there’s no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers. What matters is how we ensure that police are responding to these criminal acts when they take place, that people are brought to justice.

… it appears she has taken some advice on research methodologies, data regression, significance at the five-percent level, and so forth.

Today, knife crime was the main subject at a cabinet meeting and the vicar’s daughter plans to get jolly serious about tackling it. She did not, however, make herself available in parliament or to the press.

< Q: What do you think of Theresa May’s comment about there being no direct correlation between police numbers and the incidence of violent crime, given your previous role as home secretary?

Rudd says these crimes are heartbreaking. There are many different elements explaining the increase, she says. She says there have been a lot of new government interventions. She hopes they will make a difference. >

I honestly cannot remember a time in my life when the British police came across as so much more measured and thoughtful than the ruling politicians.

If you are in Cambridge (or London, or somewhere else not far away), please come to the first of a series of parties that I am organising to raise money for the homeless. The very first party is this Saturday, 2 March. Bring friends! If you are not in Cambridge (or London, or somewhere else not far away), please encourage anyone you know who is in my part of the world to come along.

According to James Brokenshite, the Conservative housing minister, the increase in homelessness since the Global Financial Crisis has nothing to do with government policy and cuts; instead it reflects an unrelated epidemic of drug taking and family breakdowns. To be fair, Mr Gobshite did subsequently row back on his comments, saying that we ‘need to ask ourselves some very hard questions’ about why the number of homeless has increased so much. Since Mr Brokencountry appears to be intellectually lazy, however, hard questions may be difficult to answer.

Like this:

It’s like having Edward Snowden as your next-door neighbour for Brave Dave Cameron, as The Guardian goes to work on his family’s offshore tax arrangements.

I believe there have so far been four, very carefully-worded, separate statements from Downing Street and Cameron himself on the question of offshore family businesses, trusts, and the beneficiaries of these (tabloid list here). Downing Street kicked off with ‘It’s a private matter,’ but that was very quickly kicked into touch. Let’s hope that with this succession of ‘clarifications’ Brave Dave is not heading in the direction of Bill Clinton’s immortal ‘It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.’

Two things so far reported by The Guardian stand out for me.

First, Brave Dave’s old man, Ian, was listed by the Sunday Times Rich List as being worth £10 million. But in 2010, Brave Dave had a publicly declared inheritance from his father’s estate of only £300,000, just under the £325,000 death duties tax threshold. There are four Cameron siblings, so one wonders where the rest of the loot is? Or perhaps what one would like is an explanation as to why there isn’t any more inherited or inheritable loot. Did Ian have a flutter on the horses, perhaps? As The Guardian notes, Brave Dave said in 2012 that he would be willing to publish full details of his tax affairs, and this seems like a jolly good time to do it.

Second, Ian Cameron’s company Blairmore (surely ‘moreBlair’?) was window-shopping offshore financial centres and paying zero UK taxes even as Brave Dave became Conservative Party leader and began to rail about the moral iniquity of not paying tax as you should. See here for a Brave Dave versus Jimmy Carr ‘Whose tax arrangements might turn out to be less funny?’ comparison. The key is whether Brave Dave’s immediate family benefited, or will benefit, in any way, at any time, from Ian’s quite legal but morally unpleasant tax avoidance wheezes.

Poor old Brave Dave. Why isn’t this happening to someone less agreeable? Like Boris. Or the Thin Controller.

Later, more:

Well, just this evening Brave Dave has gone on tv and admitted he’s done a little bit of a porky pie. He sold some shares in moreBlair just before becoming PM for a profit of £19,000. This is the fifth ‘clarification’.

Is it enough to draw a line under the affair? Dave is surely hoping so. But I can’t quite see it myself. £19k doesn’t quite fill the hole on the back of my envelope. Although, it is just an envelope…

The Guardian‘s Juliette Garside parses Brave Dave’s television interview of last night, here. See her comments down the right hand side. The trail, me suspects, leads to the sleazy island of Jersey… Odds on Brave Dave resigning have shortened from 20/1 to 11/2. Still a reasonable earner. And tax-free, too. I might send a child in a trench-coat over to the bookies’ to put down a tenner.

5 minutes later:

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Odds on Brave Dave going this year are now 5/2…

Will it be another bad week for Brave Dave? Over the weekend, Downing Street published a short and sanitised introduction to Dave’s tax affairs. Not even worth posting, since it is just spin. The pressure continues to mount for Dave to take his pants off, and reveal the full story. And the Thin Controller is feeling the heat too. The Treasury said last week he would not publish his fiscal break-down. Now Treasury is hinting he might offer up something. And there are loud demands to know who across the entire cabinet has offshore interests.

I feel so sorry for the Tories that I have posted the leaflet of their local council candidate in my house window. No one on my whole road votes Tory to my knowledge. So someone has to stick up for these poor rentiers…

£3 interest on money in the bank. A timely reminder of how the poor, who have nothing but a little cash in the bank, have been royally screwed by record-low interest rates while the rentier class makes out like bandits from asset appreciation fuelled by cheap debt.

£33k is the Thin Controller’s half-share (wife has the other half) of one year’s rent on his London property.

£44k is dividends from Sloane-apocalypse wallpaper business Osborne and Little.

In 2014-15 Boris pulled down £266,000 for his pisspoor Daily Telegraph column. He claims to knock out his columns ‘very fast’ on a Sunday morning, and they certainly read that way. The latest lauds Assad for having saved Palmyra from Isil.

In 2014-15 Boris earned £224,000 in book royalties, reminding us that the British public prefers to read this, when it could be reading this.

Add in the Mayoral salary for London and Boris made, gross £612,583 in 2014-15. Although there is no way he will be elected prime minister, I think he comes out of the this tax return publishing episode better than either Brave Dave or the Thin Controller. No offshore filth. No rentier income, either from bricks and mortar or from daddy’s business. Boris does actually earn his money. Which is why he pays a significantly higher effective rate of taxation than the Thin Controller. Ah, the logic of our times…

Like this:

George Osborne, who I used to call The Fat Controller, has become the Thin Controller after eating less and running more. But he is still Sir Topham Hat, insensitive nemesis of poor Thomas the Tank Engine (and all other members of the working classes).

In case you missed the Thin Controller’s latest, last week he decided to reduce taxes for the rich and the middle classes at the same time as chopping a further £4.4 billion over five years from the budget to support disabled people. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that 370,000 people with a disability would lose an average of £3,500 a year. This comes on the back of an already-implemented big squeeze on various direct and indirect forms of welfare support for the disabled.

Most of the groundswell of anger at the Thin Controller — he has already abandoned the disability benefit cut in a standard ‘oh my god, what have I done this time?’ volte-face — focused on his increase to the level at which higher earners begin to pay the 40 percent income tax rate. However this change has at least the merit of rewarding middle class work.

What gob-smacked me in the Thin Controller’s budget was the decision to make big cuts to already ridiculously low rates (compared to income tax rates on work) of Capital Gains Tax (CGT). Britain is fast becoming a rentier society, but the Thin Controller’s determination to turn us into some proto-feudal squirearchy seems to know no bounds. He cut the lower band of CGT from 18 percent to 10 percent, and the higher rate from 28 percent to 20 percent.

The old rates do remain in force for profits on one’s second, third, fourth and fifth, etc homes (i.e. for non-primary real estate). However the adjustment is a huge bung to the share- and bond-owning leisure class, of which I regard myself as an aspiring member. Thinking today about whether I should not perhaps take the next three months off and go on safari, I decided to check the HM Revenue and Customs web site and learn more about the Thin Controller’s commendable policy to encourage my indolence. Here is what I found:

<Policy objective>

<The government wants to create a strong enterprise and investment culture. Cutting the rates of CGT for most assets is intended to support companies to access the capital they need to expand and create jobs. Retaining the 28% and 18% rates for residential property is intended to provide an incentive for individuals to invest in companies over property.>

This statement has three great qualities. First, it is pure gibberish. Companies (the supposed subject of the second sentence) do not pay CGT, they pay Corporation Tax. Second, it is dishonest. Following from 1., what the Thin Controller really means is that he wants to support the stock-owning rentier class, who don’t need to work because tax rates on passive capital invested in shares and bonds were already low, and are now even lower. Annoyingly, he can’t actually say this, but we know who we are. Third, the statement is misguided. This is because no British rentier with half a brain is going to invest much of their unearned capital in British companies when the Thin Controller has created such an anaemic growth environment. One gives one’s capital to American companies like Apple, Amazon, Skyworks, Gilead, Amtrust Financial Services, American Express, American Tower, Verisk Analytics, and so on. (Disclaimer: oh yes, I own them all.) And then one pays sod all tax to the Thin Controller on the profits. Of course, in the final analysis this doesn’t matter because the Thin Controller doesn’t need the tax because he’s dismantling the welfare state.

Like this:

I recently mentioned a compelling new edition of Han Suyin’s beautiful novel And the Rain My Drink, about British conduct in the war against communist insurgency in Malaya after the Second World War.

As luck would have it, writing about British colonial perfidy seems to be the genre du jour, as one of my very favourite journalists, Ed Vulliamy (never met him), files a long investigative report about British conduct in Greece from late 1945 on. It is much the best thing I have read in The Observer for some time, and completely free.

Add a couple more case studies from South Africa, Kenya or Ireland, and we have the beginnings of a joined-up history of British colonialism.

That said, there are marks on both sides of the ledger. As Brave Dave Cameron observed on his visit to India last year: ‘I think there is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British empire did and was responsible for. But of course there were bad events as well as good events. The bad events we should learn from and the good events we should celebrate.’

He’s right. The Carry On movies were tremendous, a real boon to my childhood. And It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, not bad either.

Like this:

I am posting a number of documents by Adair Turner relating to the concept of ‘helicopter money’. The term was coined by Milton Friedman and refers to the idea of simply dropping money into an economy to expand the monetary base without any commitment by a government or central bank to ‘pay’ for the money. Indeed, the point is to increase money supply, possibly permanently, in order to pay for government expenditure.

Printing money to cover a government’s bills is never going to be an easy policy to sell. But Turner has bravely put this option on the table because the place to which the major economies of the world are heading under current policy may actually be worse.

How so? Turner’s point is that the policy of central banks expanding their balance sheets and flooding financial markets with cash to force down interest rates to zero is merely fuelling asset bubbles – in real estate, in stocks, and even now in things like fine art. What the world needs is a return to somewhat higher interest rates to head off another speculative bubble and bust (selling some Apple shares yesterday at 18 times earnings and more than four times what I paid for them reminds me we may already be in bubble territory). The problem, of course, is that higher interest rates cannot come at the expense of another collapse in the demand in the real economy and hence a spiral of 1930s-style deflation. Logically, as Turner argues, the only option may therefore be to expand the monetary base, create a bit of inflation to allow a meaningful rate of interest, and simultaneously use the printed cash pay off some government debt and fund expenditures that maintain real economic growth.

Such a policy would (probably) put the fiscal boot on the other foot compared with the past six years. Almost all UK and US policy since 2008 has favoured those with assets – real estate, stocks and bonds — as asset values have been restored by the near-zero interest rate policy. If rates rise, those who hold assets under leverage will pay more debt service and asset prices will come under pressure. On the other hand, a positive real interest rate gives those with only a bit of cash (the young, the poor) some return on their money in the bank, while money creation can pay for lower taxes on work and investment in things like infrastructure. In other words, such a policy tilts the table away from those with assets and towards those without assets but with a willingness to work for a living. You begin to see quite how outrageous this proposal is…

The proposition is indeed shocking. However it is a measure of the times in which we live that you really should read what Turner is saying. He is not a red, and nor are the economists (like Milton Friedman and Irving Fisher) whom he cites in support. Turner is pretty much an Establishment figure…

The lightest iteration of what Turner is saying is an FT opinion piece from last week. I have not done this before, but I am reproducing it in the hope the FT won’t pursue me for breach of copyright. (Having only been paid £250 for my recent opinion piece for them, perhaps they will decide they owe me a bonus; one notes that deflation is already haunting the Pink’Un.)

…

November 10, 2014

Printing money to fund deficit is the fastest way to raise rates

By Adair Turner

No technical reasons exist for rejecting this, only the fear of breaking a taboo, writes Adair Turner

What is the right course for monetary policy? The International Monetary Fund seems to answer with forked tongue. Its latest World Economic Outlook urges that monetary policy should stay loose to stimulate growth. Yet its Global Financial Stability Review warns that loose monetary policy risks creating financial instability, which could crimp growth. In fact the best policy is to print money and raise interest rates. That sounds contradictory, but it is not.

The global economy is suffering the hangover from many decades of excessive private sector credit growth. In 1950 private credit in advanced economies was 50 per cent of gross domestic product; by 2007 it was 170 per cent.

After the 2008 crisis, households and companies began trying to pay back what they owed. This depressed consumption and investment, generating large fiscal deficits as tax revenues fell and social expenditure rose. It then seemed essential to balance public sector accounts, which has depressed growth further and made deleveraging harder.

Debt owed by the public and private sectors has actually increased as a proportion of GDP, from 170 per cent five years ago to 200 per cent today. Weak demand has led to below-target inflation in all major economies.

Economists agree that this is how we got into the current mess, but they disagree about how to get out of it. Some, such as Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers, argue for more relaxed fiscal policies. Cutting taxes or increasing public expenditure is the most certain way to stimulate demand. In Milton Friedman’s words it is an injection directly “into the income stream”. But this route out of recession would increase public debt even further. It seems blocked.

Instead, most countries have opted to combine fiscal tightening with ultra-loose monetary policy, setting short-term interest rates close to zero and using quantitative easing to reduce long-term rates and boost asset prices.

There are no technical reasons to reject such measures, only the fear of breaking a taboo.

But there are dangers. Sustained low interest rates create incentives for highly leveraged financial engineering. They make it easier for uncompetitive companies to survive, which could stymie productivity growth. And they work by restarting growth in private credit – which is what led to our current predicament. The Bank for International Settlements therefore argues that monetary policy should be tightened as well as fiscal, but that would depress demand yet further.

We should indeed seek a swift return to higher interest rates, to remove the dangerous subsidy to high leverage. But paradoxically, the best way to do that, particularly in Japan and the eurozone, would be to deploy a variant of Friedman’s idea of dropping money from a helicopter. Government deficits should temporarily increase, and they should be financed with new money created by the central bank and added permanently to the money supply.

Money-financed deficits would increase demand without creating debts that have to be serviced. This would lift either real output or inflation and allow interest rates to return to normal more quickly. True, banks might amplify the stimulus by creating additional private credit, but they can be restrained with higher reserve requirements.

There are no technical reasons to reject this option, only the fear that once we break the taboo, money-financed deficits will be used on too large a scale.

Despite that fear, de facto monetisation is inevitable in some countries, even if policy makers deny it.

Japan’s official policy involves using sales tax increases to make government debts sustainable, while massive monetary stimulus spurs inflation and growth. In fact there is no believable scenario in which Japan will generate fiscal surpluses sufficient to pay back its debts, nor one in which the Bank of Japan will sell all its holdings of government debt back to the market.

All the same, the pretence undermines the effectiveness of the policy. Japan should either delay the next sales tax increase, or announce a temporary fiscal stimulus financed with new money. It should make clear that the debt the government owes the central bank will never need to be repaid, dispelling fears of a massive future fiscal tightening.

Orthodox theory sees helicopter money as risky. But current quantitative easing policies are at least as risky, and have produced adverse side effects. In the UK the Bank of England has bought £375bn of government bonds to try to stimulate the economy through swollen asset prices and rock-bottom interest rates. It could instead have created new money to finance a smaller one-off increase in the fiscal deficit. If it had done so, a return to normal interest rate disciplines would now be nearer.

And the slides that go with the CASS speech. (Lots of them, but many worth having if you live in the UK and are about to have people knocking on your door in the run-up to the May national elections asking you to vote for them. ‘Come in,’ you can say. ‘Have a seat and let’s look at the slides together!’)

Finally, on Thursday 20 November, the UK parliament will hold a backbench debate on the topic of ‘money creation and society’. It will be the first time that the issue has been addressed in a full debate in the House since the 19th century. You can watch here on Parliament TV and discover just how ill-equipped our politicians are to deal with the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Britain’s Chancellor George Osborne has lost an impressive amount of weight in the past year. So much so that I was thinking I might have to stop calling him The Fat Controller.

It turns out, however, that George still loves a pork pie.

Witness the recent furore over Britain’s increased European Commission bill to reflect an upward revision to the estimated size of the British economy. The bill is linked to the size of the economy, then Britain gets a rebate (negotiated back in the 1980s) to reflect Britain’s relatively lower receipts of EU agricultural subsidies.

Anyhow, first Brave Dave Cameroon said he wasn’t going to pay the £1.7 billion extra charge. Then people slightly less dim than Cameron realised that Britain has to pay the bill, because there is nothing unusual or exceptional about it. It is just the regular bill, amended on the basis of statistical revisions that occur periodically in all statistical systems.

So now the Fat Controller is claiming in the press to have ‘halved’ the £1.7 billion bill. What he means is that because there is an automatic rebate, the bill is really only about £850 million. But George wants to pretend this represents him having ‘negotiated a deal’ with the EU on a trip to Brussels this week.

He has done no such thing. George’s trip secured some very marginal fiddling around with payment due dates, doubtless because EU officials just wanted to get him out of the building as fast as possible. But he hasn’t ‘negotiated’ anything of any substance. Whatsoever.

Instead, George is just telling bare-faced Porky Pies. Like some fantasist kid in a school playground.

And that is why I am going to continue to call him the Fat Controller. No matter how much weight he loses.

I return from a drink with a Japanologist, and decide that one for my road is in order at the pub at the end of our road, the Red Bull in Newnham, Cambridge.

Inside is frequent bar-propper Rory McGrath, of television fame. I don’t know him, but various people I do do. Since he does a comedy telly programme about Three Men on a Boat (I have watched perhaps 10 mins, have no view on it), puttering around the UK on narrow barges talking about who knows what, I show him a couple of pics that I took of a narrow barge that was granted permission to come up among the colleges recently. I blogged about it.

All good so far. Then, I say: ‘Listen, I don’t know you, but I was very surprised about the idea that Griff Rhys Jones might be a closet Nazi.’ This seems to me like standard pub banter. If you haven’t followed the story, RJ gave a long interview to the Telegraph in which he said that if the next government introduces a ‘mansion tax’ he might emigrate. The point is that RJ is quite funny, and yet, confronted in middle age with a modest tax on the huge capital gain he has made on London property, he suggests he might move to somewhere where I suspect he does not even speak the language.

Well, this set Mr McGrath off on the kind of frighteningly aggressive one-on-one verbal assault that I have not seen since I complained about being short-changed, as a student, on a marijuana purchase in Ladbroke Grove in circa 1985. That earlier incident did involve a knife, but the bile from McGrath was very much the same. It made me wonder if even comedians fall into the stylised description of John Carey’s classic work in which the British intelligentsia is shown to be drearily self-interested, drunk, and small C conservative.

I walked home thinking that McGrath must have some sort of point. But I can’t see it. Even if Rhys Jones spent 100% of purchase price fixing up his principal London home, he still made 4 million quid tax free. The mansion tax would be frivolous by comparison. Indeed it would be a much less rational tax, and a much lower tax, than one linked to capital appreciation. Andy Wightman sets out the numbers clearly on his blog.

These people — RJ — used to be our heroes. So what happened? I cannot even begin to imagine. To paraphrase, perhaps we are looking at: ‘All money corrupts, and lots of money corrupts a lot.’

Meanwhile Rory McGrath, was essentially trying to pick a physical fight with words of crushing violence. It appears he has form in this area. What do I say? I say: Fat. Drunk. And this evening ignorant. Sober up, my friend. I hope we will kiss and make up.

A new study from the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London shows that migrants from the European Union make a net contribution to the UK fiscal system — it looks to me, very roughly, like a cumulative 1 percent of GDP over the past 10 years.

I tell this to Camilla the Polish cleaner as she starts folding washing in the kitchen. She looks suspicious. I ask why. She says that the UK benefits system is outrageously generous and that fake ‘single mothers’ with husbands or fiancees ‘living’ at second addresses of convenience are driving around Cambridge in Audis while claiming benefits.

I ask her to unpack these assertions. First, she says, when she had cancer last year there were bleeding-heart liberals from the council coming round to her flat encouraging her to claim housing benefit because she was too ill to work. Naturally, she refused and sent them packing. ‘I have my savings,’ she says, and she never intended to let cancer keep her out of the labour market for more than a year. It did not.

Fair enough. But does she actually know any fake single mothers whose partners are living at separate addresses so that they can claim benefits? It costs at least £80 a week in Cambridge to rent a room. Would the benefits you could get by this ruse be substantially more than the £80 cost? She doesn’t know because she doesn’t claim benefits. And, no, she doesn’t have any actual cases of fake single mothers with Audis to present. But there are definitely Polish people who drive Audis.

Camilla goes back to earning her £10-an-hour, telling me how much she likes our house and her job. ‘People ask me why I do cleaning,’ she says, ‘but just now I am happy to have less pressure and spend more time with my kids.’ She used to be the Operations Manager of a chain of hotels in and around Cambridge. The last cleaner, a Hungarian, was a Research Chemist and left last year after being offered a too-good-to-refuse job in a research laboratory. She apologised that we poor English people would have to do our own cleaning for a couple of weeks, until Camilla showed up.

So this is all rather bad news for UKIP and Theresa May. How to loathe those who pay in more than they take out? The Brits, of course, are substantial net drainers of the welfare system at present. But self-loathing is hardly a viable election strategy.

Britain’s Essex-born Tory Immigration Minister was quick, when the report was published, to suggest that the Tories have never claimed EU migrants are net benefit scroungers (ho, ho, ho — this chump trained as a lawyer). Instead the problem is all about putting too much pressure on public infrastructure [which the Tories have failed to invest in for several decades]. If you have a sub to the FT, you can read his weaselly drivel here.

The serious point about the study is that it highlights the brain drain from continental Europe to the UK, as over-regulated labour markets in southern Europe, and eastern European countries with a dearth of professional jobs, force hard-working young people onto planes to the UK, with its highly deregulated labour market. Once there, all they have to do is to compete with poorly educated, monolingual Brits who drink during the day…

The point is well made by David Green of centre-right think-tank Civitas in The Guardian.

Anyhow, all this leads us to the blog post I need to write about Italy.

Blogroll

Baseline Scenario
About the US economy, mostly. These boys are not too funny (they are economists) but they put in serious hours on this site and it is worth reading. Johnson is a Brit former IMF economist with perspective. Updated daily.

John Kay
About Britain and micro-economic issues. Research-heavy analysis rather than opinion. One of the few people with really clear ideas on bank regulation, but not yet (for me) fully thought through.

Krugman
Posts multiple times a day cos he’s manic. I was at a boring conference with him where he appeared to take frantic notes. Later transpired all he had written on his pad was ‘I need a beer’, about one hundred times. Still got Nobel.

Martin Wolf (FT sub needed)
Particularly good on Europe. During his life, Wolf has fallen in love with — and then become disillusioned by — the Labour Party, the World Bank, and perhaps now globalisation. The constant is his hunger for answers.

The Big Lychee
About Hong Kong. Affiliated with Hemlock, the exquisitely misanthropic, underemployed, billionaire’s gweilo running dog. Original Hemlock files available. Updated every day, because the author has a huge salary and nothing better to do.